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Why Does A Frozen Lake Sound Like A Star Wars Blaster?

By Adam Cole,
Ryan Kellman
Published December 21, 2016 at 10:26 AM EST

This winter brings the latest installment of the Star Wars franchise, full of familiar costumes, familiar villains, and the familiar "pew pew pew" of space guns. But you can skip the movie theatre and still hear those iconic blaster sounds if you visit a frozen lake.

Cory Williams discovered this natural phenomenon back in 2014, when he moved from California to Alaska. He tried skipping rocks across the icy surface of Edmonds Lake, just up the road from Anchorage. His YouTube video of the space age twanging that ensued was viewed 11 million times.

This year, Williams returned to Edmonds Lake and made another discovery. The lake was singing on its own. Why? And how? The latest video from Skunk Bear, NPR's science youtube channel, reveals the origin of that iconic sci-fi sound effect and explains why it can be heard every year in the frigid wilds.

Got your own science-y questions for us? Use this form to send them our way. We'll do our best to answer on Skunk Bear's YouTube channel.

You can follow Cory Williams' Alaskan adventures on his YouTube channel, LiveEachDay.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Adam Cole
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Ryan Kellman
Ryan Kellman is a producer and visual reporter for NPR's science desk. Kellman joined the desk in 2014. In his first months on the job, he worked on NPR's Peabody Award-winning coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He has won several other notable awards for his work: He is a Fulbright Grant recipient, he has received a John Collier Award in Documentary Photography, and he has several first place wins in the WHNPA's Eyes of History Awards. He holds a master's degree from Ohio University's School of Visual Communication and a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.
See stories by Ryan Kellman
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